The Cure kick off new tour by playing two new songs
The Cure have kicked off their extensive world tour with a performance in Latvia, the first of 44 dates that will take the band around the UK and Europe.
Fans were treated to two new songs, ‘Alone’ and ‘Endsong’, which are assumed to be from the band’s long-awaited upcoming album, Songs of a Lost World. Reunited with keyboardist Perry Bamonte, who was a band member between 1990 and 2005, the Cure debuted ‘Alone’ as the very first song of the set, opening with ‘This is the end of every song we sing’.
A total of 25 songs were played in total, with the band delivering two encores laden with hits such as ‘Friday I’m in Love’, ‘Just Like Heaven’ and ‘Boys Don’t Cry’. Before the first encore, The Cure played ‘Endsong’, a bleaker cut that saw Robert Smith sing: “No hopes, no dreams, no love – I don’t belong’.
Joining the band on tour is The Twilight Sad, one of Smith’s favourite bands. The Cure played an impressive setlist, including ‘A Forest’, ‘The Walk’, ‘Lovesong’, ‘Pictures of You’, and ‘Disintegration’.
Smith has been teasing the band’s new album for quite some time, revealing that the band had been working on two new albums back in 2020. Earlier this year, he claimed that one of these albums would be “real very soon”. Although the frontman hoped new material would be released by the tour’s beginning, we have yet to receive any new recordings from the band.
He shared: “Essentially, it’s a 12-track album. It’s there, it’s kind of half-mixed and half-finished. It’s a weird thing. It’s kind of evolved over the last two years. It hasn’t always been a good thing to have been left alone with it. You pick at it, like picking at seams, and everything falls apart. It’ll be worth the wait. I think it’s the best thing we’ve done, but then I would say that. I’m not doing an Oasis when I say that, ‘IT’S THE BEST FOOKIN’ ALBUM’. A lot of the songs are difficult to sing, and that’s why it’s taken me a while.”
He continued by saying it “doesn’t have very much light on it,” suggesting that it sounds “more like ‘Disintegration’ than ‘Head On The Door’. It’s pretty relentless, which will appeal to the hardcore of our audience, but I don’t think we’ll be getting any Number One singles off it or anything like that! It’s been quite harrowing like it has for everyone else.”
“I’ve been more privileged than most, but lockdown and Covid has affected me in as much as I’ve lost an entire generation of aunts and uncles in under a year,” he added. “It’s things like that which have informed the way I’ve been with the record. Essentially we recorded two albums in 2019. I’ve been trying to finish two at the same time, which is pretty much impossible. One is nearly ready to go.”
The band will head to Helsinki on Saturday, October 8th, before visiting Sweden, Norway, Germany, Poland, Italy and more. In December, The Cure will play the UK, finishing the tour at London’s Wembley Arena.
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